Fun Christmas Tree Quilts

It's a little early, but I was sorting through some things in the loft, and with the Christmas decorations I saw this quilt. Again, I know I have a few hazy photos, so here goes. 

Being a fan of Amy at ‘The Diary of a Quilter’ blog I had admired her quilts and especially her Christmas Tree quilt for a long while. I decided to make a couple of Christmas quilts made up of Christmas Tree blocks. Amy has lots of information, free tutorials, a free pattern for a Christmas Tree quilt and an alternate pattern for a Christmas Tree quilt with different blocks forsale on her blog. You can see how she made her Christmas Tree blocks by watching Amy's great tutorial. 

I made my quilts and blocks different sizes for a couple of reasons. I wanted to get the most efficient number of blocks cut from FQs and to make the quilt interesting and easy to piece I wanted blocks of different widths and equal heights so that I could sew them in rows, but not have to match seams as I sewed the rows together. After a bit of scribbling and maths I came up with three different width blocks.

The material was sourced from several places, my stash, Frumble Fabrics , eBay sellers, I think Aldi and a couple of experimental pieces from AliExpress. The backing fabric is a 100% quilt cover from Ikea bought for the purpose.

I choose some fabric with a dog theme and some with a cat theme to represent the pets in the households - I used some of the dachshund fabric to make cushions for my mother and some in the quilt for my sister and a mixture of everything in a quilt for me. I was keen to make some busy quick to cut and piece quilts, partly so that I could have them done for Christmas and mostly so that I could use them to practice quilting with the secondhand quilting frame I had bought a couple of months earlier. It is a Grace wooden frame with a Janome 16000P, but that is a post for another day.

These were fun to piece and sew together. I quilted them with an overall squiggle, including the odd star here and there. My Mum and sister use them all year round. I’ll take a couple of photos of the cushions next time I visit Mum. I saved a few extra blocks to make a table runner and possibly a cushion for me, maybe I will get around to that this year!